Friday

and he wasn't. but they were bloody good. i shouldn't be writing this. i should be on the train home to the parent's wedding function at the george, alstonefield. last exam, woohoo! right. i only came back here to update my mp3 player, look at me. 'nuff. (the campapign against leading vowels continues [nd prml scrm cn fck ff])

last blog for quite some time maybe. so here's my summer schedule:
today: go home
monday or tuesday: come back, brighton time alone. contemplation.
somteime that week, probably saturday: come back to the peaks again.
15th july (approx): fred's wedding.round trip involving bath, somerset, and bristol, and anyone playing at clwb ifor bach.
22 july: leave for indonesia and all that concerns.
22 august: get back, a richer, rounder person.
september: get a fucking job, ya bum. (resits?)
october: come back, brighton. living with jess, laurenec, and possibly joel (jess ain't sure anymore).

i can't get sale of the centuary by sleeper out of my head. no particular reason.

sat an exam today (nu?). i was shitting myself, so i had a baked potato with cheese and beans. i'll repeat that, because it's important: i had a jacket potato, with cheese, and, beans. and a somosa. and a ca-puchino flapjack. the exam wasn't too bad.

bannana co:

whoah woah woah woah woah! is this a talk show, or what? i will now start that again, without the fucking french dictionary in the front.

there you are, thom! (hook reference).

what's that all about then eh? looking forward to the one yesterday. it didn't go great and that shattered my confidence. now i'm so confused and i've got a full day to revise for the next one. what's going on? (waves hands in thom yorke 'meeting people is easy' kind of way).
good bye.

today made me realise how well my exams have been going. this morning's exam was.. fine. i can't remember it now. woke up at both 3 and 6 o'clock in the morning, after having not slept very well, perhaps chips and two-night-old vindaloo was to blame (man alive, blogging backwards? what am i, bloody momento?)i had an innocent smoothie before (the shop's last one), as has become the norm. non-symbolic artificial intelligence... i wrote about continuous time recurrent neural networks and artificial neural nets/genetic algorithms. that took so much effort to remember! then james carey and i went for lunch at, ultimately, afras, where all the pretty people who don't do any work hang out (i.e. arts students) noel was working at the cafe. they'd made some macaroni cheese, which sold out in ten minutes. no-one has had macaroni cheese for ages! and it was fucking tasty, they'd got the crispy stuff on top just right, and it was good and mustardy. exam number two - symbolic artificial intellgence (ah, did you see what they did there...). fifteen minutes reading before; james got in a minute late. we both sat there for 25 minutes, no-one typed a word. the whole thing was a complete joke. bumped into josh on the way out, on his way up to complain about it, so sat with three other people in david young's office about what we could do and what the exam board could do... just got this email:

Hi, we're a group of SAI students who feel several of the questions in
today's exam were ambiguous and that what was required was generally
very unclear.
We feel that the paper was more than merely hard - the lack of clarity
made it difficult or impossible to provide a sensible answer.

There are channels through which we can complain. If you agree with the
above conclusions, please send an email to
Student Support at scitechssc@sussex.ac.uk
Paul Lister (head of informatics) P.F.Lister@sussex.ac.uk
Kerith Harris (Student Advisor) K.Harris@sussex.ac.uk

with the subject "Symbolic AI exam complaint".

We have also put in writing some of the things we consider to be wrong
with the paper, and this will be available at the next few exams to sign
if you wish.
However, sending an email is likely to give your voice more weight,
particularly if you describe what you personally feel was wrong with
paper.

Sam F, Matthew G and Simon H, on behalf of several students involved in
formulating these complaints

so i know it wasn't just me going wrong, and the meagre crud i wrote for the exam was normal.

we travel further back through the weekend.
last night i finished off the beer, had a david gower and went to bed. i had been trying to revise, but was distracted by robin taking her tea set away. that was very sad. bought some CDs off alex - salad (believe me), smashing pumpkins (no, i never owned melon cholly! don't hate me!), super furrys, and the orb. that was the day.
on the previous day, that would be saturday, i got a call from rachel to say that susie weston (rachel's mum) was down, and would i like to come for some saturday brighton lunch? i thought short and insulated loft and said yes. infinity foods - mmmm. bumbed into laurenec (who prefers to be called laurence) who was with corey and corey's fella, and i tell you what, it was lovely to finally meet him, and his milKill t-shirt. blimey. that night was anna's house's barbecue. beer of the night - marston's firestoker. tastes like creme broulay! jess and i walked back, and sang the entire weezer album (up until the bit where her copy got taped over by reef's "place your hands", which i had forgotten and mis-interpreted as a banging techno tune {now there's an idea} - PUT YOUR HANDS UP!!PUT YOUR HANDS UP!!) that got us back double time. bumped into fletcher three times this week, to the point where i now just expect to see him everywhere. i'm going to do my barry bladder impression for you again now.

back. but off home.

what else happened...
less than a week till my shell and tim get married.
less than a month till fred gets married.
exactly a month today (allegedly) my flight leaves for far off lands - i paid for the flights now.
well that's lovely. see you later!
gxx

Tuesday

i was shitting myself about today's exam, and it went fine. maybe that's because i did some of the questions this morning that, word for word, came up on the exam (if only i'd known what the answers were).

this place is turning into a gillen shrine. go here and read negativeLand - it's lo-fi, great, and stars my brother as a robot. go on - poke around his flat, and see what him and his friends would get up to if keiron was god.

i do spend too much time here. proof?must sort out the layout. see how the big picture shunts the links all the way down to the bottom? ah...
off home now. speak to me there.

Monday

anyone remember mp3 of the week? well, sorry about the low bit rate, but this is just great.
and why did radiohead never release this, possibly there most blissfull song?
and an 'ah, do you see what they've done here?' moment. does humour belong in music? it's very well executed. but it's really not that funny.
cuttooth has always been a fantastic source, and now the man's gone and put up an ep by his own outfit (or is it a solo project?) which is also pretty nice. inspired me - when i've given out all 60 copies of womanSour, i'm going to put it on soundclick. and there will only be this batch ever made - if you want a cd quality copy, ask me now!

other than that, my life's pretty awful. coming home to an empty house, alone, afraid of the future. the people i'm giving money to, to take me away and show me the world, are probably crooks or cowboys. i hate this week's exams. hate is too strong a word - they invoke cruddy feelings of frustration that i have to learn stuff of absolutely no use to the world. but then i chose this course. that's what (that's what!) is so awful about my situation - every problem i have, is my fault. i think i'm going to go to bournemouth. i mean, that's what people do when they're deppressed, right? 87) i hope you're well, thom.

bugger. i'd better get on. i need to take electro-shock blues back off raych. that'll see me through.

Thursday

Kieron has a wonderful rant about the new PCG - could he be the first person to write "post-Bow-Nigger" on the internet? (explanation)
i'd post a comment, but i can't write well enough.
went to the wrong page, looking for him.. came up with this.

oh, and i might change the template, since there's now about forty to choose from. i'll mess around with the fonts and wotnot though 87)

truth be told? i've been looking at gay porn.
i'm not being ironic. i think it's well good; imagine a site that invites you to take part - it's time to move over to "nymphography" (i'd appreciate it if this made it into the badger, but it's too late now). their "sister" site's even better.
they must know that most of their customers are there to take the piss, but i guess that's why it's viable; does that make it porn again, that they sell themselves out?

i'm a bit pissed (on a pint of guiness, begorahh) and i'm about to send a text which is 'intended' ironically but actually has a very serious undertone and could, accidentally, be taken the right way. it'll probably cause trouble. but it could be so funny.
i'm so paranoid.

(laurenec's right about degrees of amazingness replacing actual adjectives)

Friday

well. blogs being directly proportionate to time spent at uni, i haven't written since i handed in my last assignment. so here, in a glorious true-type font, is my last seven days.

after handing in my work on friday (it ate me), i bumped into 'the guys' in library square and went to sit outside falmer bar and eat and drink. the cook there can be pretty good - always go for the specials or the soup. jess and i had good fucking curry, vegan to boot. sweet potato, lentil and coconut; jess chipped in a seventh of the price and et nearly half, but i don't mind. had some peanuts too. you really, really didn't need to know that. so glossing over the gaps, i'm gonna go a bit faster now. time came to go home; went to the bike, unlocked it and thought, "ooh, better just go to the loo." thus began two hours of net action involving boytaurs. just as i was on the verge of leaving, thom rang, he was on campus too! yay! he'd just moved in 'cause his house was falling down. we went to psy society night at east-slope, with rache, who then went to "all mouth, no trousers" and became the first woman there to read poetry in the nude, in the four years they've been running it. i'm so proud of her.

but right though, why is psy-trance so... normal? it's completely 'un-psychedelic'. psycedelia is surely about losing your mind, listen to robert wyatt and kevin ayers and trout mask replica and then tell me about psychedelia. it reminds me of listening to the grateful dead - boring, MOR blues. point being, you have to be on copius amounts of mind-altering substances to find it remotely psychedlic.

yeah, but plenty of people listen to psytrance without doing drugs and have a great time!

right, but plenty of people listen to folk without taking drugs and have a great time. and plenty of people listen to genuinely psychedlic music, with or without drugs, and have a great time. and some people listen to chris de burgh without anything and have a great time but no-one's claiming that to be psychedelic. so it's not about the drugs, which i know absolutely nothing about; it's giving the right name to a scene. psy-trance is a psychedelic scene based around music i find, on the whole, quite dull.

well, each to their own.

there's two sides to every story.

so then i went back to thom's new pad, listened to vauxhall & I and blue jam, and we went to bed. eerily comforting, but i tried to leave about three in the morning when i ran out of room on the bed. then went back to sleep, or what amounts to sleep when i'm in bed with someone. actually, sleeping with jo was well comfortable, so it must just be certain people or certain beds.

woke up and went postering for MUNGG, sticking lovely jeffrey brown cartoons all over campus. went home, tired and sore of back. saturday was beth's meal at nia, crippling my weeks budget. £240 between 11 people, fankfully i only had to put £15 in. we meant to make it to the pub by 9.30, and had told people to meet us there. they turned up but we never did. went back to beth's for cool music and scary drug biscuits and booze.

sunday? laurence came home from reading and seeing the old gang and the marvellous Senser, loaded with Envy Cds. very good. got message from thom, bad news. put me in a very low mood. it's all getting too much. half watched shite telly and went to bed early.

next few days: chased round town looking for people to donate to our fund-raising raffle; the lovely man in the yellow submarine gave me a ten pound t-shirt but no-one else cared. ended up buying three bottles of wine for a tenner, knowing i'd make the money back in the end. et bagels and cookies and soup and coffee.

so the line up for MUNGG - myself, laurence, beth and robin. started with 'black ants in sound dust' by stereolab, followed by hadid by quickspace. bands i'm bitter we didn't play -
valerie
grilly
blur
cult of luna
super furry animals.
and probably many others, but what we did play (including strange by) went down so well. i did this great grind mix, with "mild und leise" by paul lansky inbetween naplam death, the locust, and agoraphobic nosebleed. at that point, i thought the punters had got the message, so we stuck something a bit mellower on. but that was my highlight. next time - more grind. so it went very well and we raised about 22 quid. never mind.
the night after was strange by's last gig (possibly). without thom, so even more final-tastic. but they bloody rocked. andy's singing has got really good, and from a shaky begining they've become a mighty force for good. lots of silly rock postures and thrash-punk. great. yes it was. it was so the scene place to be, all the cool indie kids who never make eye contact with me in one easy room. dancing with steve was well good. i can dance to anything! except cheesy pop. then got chatting to jennifer from my course, who i'd never properly spoken to before. went upstairs with her and laurence, but jess queued outside for half an hour with Brobin then went home, so we didn't stayt very long either. went round rachel and robns, who were watching west side story for rachy-poos exam today. watched another half-hour of willow. took the piss out of big brother. got dragged home; bumped into jordan on the way back, hilarious. he was drunk and damp and hiccuppy and totally confused by people saying his name. lovely.